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ST. PAUL, MINN. — What a felicitous night! A legion of exultant fans lay on blankets in the outfield of CHS Field, while thousands more filled the stands, there to participate in one of this region’s grand summer pastimes. Not exactly the beloved state fair, but close.

“Wouldn’t dream of missing it,” Teresa Heselton of Owatonna, Minn., said of her third annual pilgrimage. “This is a really good time.”

Her son, Carson, accompanied her, a pink kitty bed framing his bewhiskered face. It would appear strange anywhere else, but it won the 13-year-old fleeting celebrity for the evening and a swarm of smartphone snaps.

Heselton and her son were among a crowd of 13,000 enthusiasts who crowded this new ballpark last week, not for minor-league baseball but for a festival entirely devoted to cat videos. Attendance set a record, for the venue and the Internet Cat Video Festival, now in its fourth purrrr-inducing year.

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The festival highlights videos celebrating cats in all their guises, and beyond — cats as artists, as philosophers, as criminal masterminds (El Gato, not El Chapo), geniuses all.

There are videos documenting cats’ triumph over basically every other living animal — birds, hamsters, dogs (happy, trusting, unwitting dogs), bears (yes, really) and, of course, humans, their loyal supplicants. Cats are the Tom Cruises of online videos, the wily heroes of virtually every story. (The exceptions: Cats being undone by bananas and other cats.)

Launched originally as a lark, possibly a one-time summer fling, the Internet Cat Video Festival, like its subject, keeps winning new converts.

Featuring a 70-minute video reel culled from 15,000 international submissions, the event is produced not by someone in his basement but by the venerable Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, one of the United States’s pre-eminent institutions of contemporary art. The selected videos, curated by first “Golden Kitty” winner Will Braden, will travel to other feline events. Last year’s reel was exhibited in 75 cities, including Toronto, making the Walker festival the Sundance of Internet cat videos.

Cat video fans are not necessarily the same as actual cat fanciers, but cat lovers do appear to be rabid fans of the genre.

“They make me laugh,” said Karen Sokolowski of nearby Northfield, who arrived for her first festival nearly five hours before the CHS Field gates opened. “And you can’t have enough laughs.”

She knows from cats, owning 14.

Fans came dressed as all manner of feline (cute, menacing and fetching being the dominant strains), in cat ears, cat makeup, whiskers and an endless parade of cat T-shirts: “Hillary Kitten for president” and other examples that cannot be printed here.

The video festival was conceived as an inexpensive, fun event to bring patrons to the Walker, although, like most cat videos, it has yet to produce a significant monetary return for its host institution.

(Tickets were $10 — $8 for Walker members — to cover the cost of renting the field.)

Four years ago, then-Walker program associate Katie Hill, a devoted cat lover, suggested a deceptively simple idea: “Let’s show some cat videos on a projector onto a retaining wall for around 50 people.” Later, she upped her estimate to “maybe 500.”

“I was worried,” Hill said. “What if people come, and they don’t like it?”

That August afternoon, the highway adjacent to the Walker came to a standstill.

An estimated 10,000 people covered the Walker’s Open Field, home to its summer outdoor programming (now under construction, hence this year’s move to CHS Field.) The consensus: More, please.

Now the Internet Cat Video Festival is its own institution, more populist than esthetic, faithful to the homegrown nature of the medium. Anyone can enter, anyone can vote. Entries range from amateur to highly accomplished, said Seattle filmmaker Braden, who hosted the show and selected the five finalists.

Experienced directors, often more interested in craft than content, can lose sight of the videos’ ultimate intent, which is to make people laugh, evoke “aawwwws,” or preferably both. The festival was dedicated to Cecil the Lion, who, to the horror of Minnesotans, was infamously killed by a local dentist and trophy hunter.

Some 40,000 votes were cast for the Golden Kitty. The award, which weighs as much as some cats, went to Alana Grelyak and Michael Gabriele of Chicago for their Cat Behavior Finally Explained, a parody of the MasterCard “Priceless” ad campaign and a heartfelt appeal to adopt rescue cats.

Internet videos, being a home-based industry, mark cats’ revenge on the historic cinematic dominance of more compliant dogs and horses.

The festival remains the rare cultural event at which the subject generally fails to put in an appearance. Two years ago, when CatVidFest was held at the Minnesota State Fair (when the Walker’s grounds were also under construction), marked the historic meeting of Internet sensations (and the rare cats impervious to crowds) Lil Bub and Grumpy Cat, not quite Generals Grant and Lee at Appomattox, but close.

This year, despite the feline fashion parade, not a single actual cat was observed in attendance, many cats being notoriously housebound.

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